Daily – Biblical Archaeology Societyhttps://www.biblicalarchaeology.org
Bringing the Ancient World to LifeThu, 15 Feb 2018 15:04:34 +0000en-UShourly1https://wordpress.org/?v=4.8.1Classical Corner: A Subterranean Surprise in the Roman Catacombshttps://www.biblicalarchaeology.org/daily/biblical-topics/post-biblical-period/classical-corner-subterranean-surprise-roman-catacombs/
https://www.biblicalarchaeology.org/daily/biblical-topics/post-biblical-period/classical-corner-subterranean-surprise-roman-catacombs/#respondThu, 15 Feb 2018 14:00:53 +0000https://www.biblicalarchaeology.org/?p=53141What are 1,300 non-Christian burials dating to the second century C.E. doing in the middle of one of Rome’s most important Christian catacombs?

In 2002, a burst pipe caused a sinkhole to form in the basement of the Istituto Sacra Famiglia, a convent and school located along Rome’s Via Casilina. The sisters were no doubt surprised when the sinkhole revealed not only faulty plumbing in need of repair, but also chambers in which several hundred burials were discovered. These burials, which are believed to date to the end of the second century C.E. or the beginning of the third, were of individuals whose bodies had been carefully but hastily wrapped and deposited at the same time, indicating some sort of mass fatality event. Over the next several years of investigations carried out by the Pontificia Commissione di Archeologia Sacra (Pontifical Commission for Sacred Archaeology), almost 345 individuals were examined and analyzed from an estimated total of more than 1,300.

Such a discovery is in and of itself remarkable and tantalizingly mysterious: What catastrophic event led to the death of more than 1,300 people—mostly young adults, including women—in such a short period of time? But perhaps just as puzzling was another question: What were these evidently non-Christian burials doing in the middle of one of Rome’s most important Christian catacombs?1 These chambers underneath the convent’s ruined basement were indeed firmly ensconced in the catacombs of Saints Peter and Marcellinus, a complex comprising approximately 2.8 miles of galleries on three levels, in which 20,000–25,000 early Christians are buried.

Knowledge of the catacomb itself has always existed, even after it fell out of use as an active burial site (along with most of Rome’s other catacombs) around the beginning of the fifth century. However, such places were then venerated and visited by early pilgrims, as the catacombs were believed to be the resting places of many of Christianity’s early saints and martyrs. According to tradition, Saints Peter and Marcellinus were martyred during the reign of Diocletian and were subsequently interred in their eponymous catacomb at the beginning of the fourth century, by which point the catacombs are believed to have already been in use by the Christian community for several decades. More recently, the catacombs were explored and mapped by the famous archaeologist Giovanni Battista de Rossi at the end of the 19th century, and portions of the catacombs were used as an air-raid shelter by local people during World War II. The convent’s foundations likely hindered exploration of the area directly underneath it, and it would take a broken water line 18 centuries later for the mass burial that pre-dates the catacombs themselves to be discovered in their midst.

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The answer to the mystery of how and why these burials came to be here is likely found in the history of the property itself. Prior to the Constantinian age, this area was the location of the barracks of the equites singulares Augusti, a private corps of mounted Imperial bodyguards. The skeletal remains do not display any of the obvious bone trauma consistent with a massacre. The most likely explanation for such a large number of simultaneous fatalities is an epidemic sweeping through the city at the end of the second/beginning of the third century.2 Given the close quarters of the soldiers and their families, such an event would have been particularly devastating in the barracks.

Christians were given the use of the ground underneath the equites’ garrison around the mid-third century by the emperor Gallieneus, a conciliatory gesture from the emperor in order to placate a community that had been savagely persecuted under the reign of his father, Emperor Valerian. When the Christians began to construct the catacombs, the chambers containing the earlier burials were simply incorporated into the growing complex. Several decades later, following the end of the civil war between Constantine and Maxentius, the equites singulares Augusti were disbanded by an irate Emperor Constantine following his victory over Maxentius at the Battle of the Milvian Bridge in 312 C.E.; the unfortunate equites had backed the wrong emperor. The property was then given by Constantine to his mother, Helena. It is here that she constructed her own final resting place. To access the catacombs today, one walks by the ruins of what was once her magnificent mausoleum.

Today, the savvy visitor to Rome can access this extraordinary site. A sinkhole in the basement of a convent opened a subterranean door to an archaeological mystery, the investigation of which led to a concerted effort by the Pontifical Commission to undertake extensive excavations and repairs of the catacombs. After several years of painstaking and beautifully executed restoration work, the catacombs of Saints Peter and Marcellinus boast some of the most skillfully rendered and restored frescoes of any of the city’s subterranean burial sites. Particularly noteworthy are its many fine depictions of the concept of refrigerium, a custom borrowed by the Christians from the Greek and Roman tradition of holding funerary banquets in honor of the deceased. In the Christian ethos of this era, this custom came to be closely tied to the sacrament of the Eucharist, and banqueting scenes from the context of the Roman catacombs are among the earliest known images in the canon of Christian art. What began as a plumbing headache for the dismayed sisters of the Istituto Sacra Famiglia turned out to be a serendipitous catalyst for the opening of one of Rome’s most enigmatic sites.3

“Classical Corner: A Subterranean Surprise in the Roman Catacombs” by Sarah K. Yeomans originally appeared in the January/February 2018 issue of Biblical Archaeology Review.Sarah K. Yeomans is the Director of Educational Programs at the Biblical Archaeology Society. She is currently pursuing her doctorate at the University of Southern California and specializes in the Imperial period of the Roman Empire with a particular emphasis on religions and ancient science. She is also a faculty member in the Department of Religious Studies at West Virginia University.

Notes:

1. Grave goods buried with several of the individuals indicate that these individuals were almost certainly not Christians.

]]>https://www.biblicalarchaeology.org/daily/biblical-topics/post-biblical-period/classical-corner-subterranean-surprise-roman-catacombs/feed/0The Song of Songs: Love Is Strong as Deathhttps://www.biblicalarchaeology.org/daily/biblical-topics/bible-interpretation/song-of-songs/
https://www.biblicalarchaeology.org/daily/biblical-topics/bible-interpretation/song-of-songs/#commentsWed, 14 Feb 2018 14:00:48 +0000https://www.biblicalarchaeology.org/?p=46803The Song of Songs (or Song of Solomon) from the Hebrew Bible is a love song beyond compare—although it has been compared to everything. Some have deemed it lewd entertainment. Others have sung its praise.

“Love Is Strong as Death—but Don’t Spend the Family’s Wealth”

By Philip Stern

The Song of Songs (or Song of Solomon) from the Hebrew Bible is a love song beyond compare—although it has been compared to everything. Some have deemed it ancient pornography. Others have sung its praise. In the second century C.E., Rabbi Akiva called it the “holy of holies.”1

Modern artist Marc Chagall’s interpretation of the Song of Songs. Photo: Courtesy Jacabook.

Saadia Gaon, a prodigious tenth-century scholar and rabbi, observed that Song of Songs resembles a locked door to which the key is missing. However, I believe that the key to understanding the Song is near at hand:

6 Set me as a seal upon your heart,
As a seal upon your arm.
For strong as death is love,
Harsh as the netherworld (Sheol) is passion.
Her flames are flames of fire,
a mighty blaze.

7 Torrents of water cannot extinguish love,
Rivers cannot sweep it away!
[Yet] if a man were to expend
all the wealth of his house for love,
[People] would surely heap scorn upon him.

(Song of Songs 8:6–7, author’s translation)

Although the translation “strong as death” in verse 6 is long established—going back to the earliest translation we have, the Greek Septuagint (c. 150 B.C.E.)—I would add the nuance, “fierce.”2 “Fierce” has the advantage of being a good parallel to “harsh,” and both “fierce” and “strong” are definitions available to the Hebrew reader. Both characterize the attitude toward love of the Song.

Scholars have long tangled with this passage. An example of a scholar armed with erudition and insight, yet who comes to a startling conclusion, is that of Aren Wilson-Wright of the University of Texas at Austin.3 To Wilson-Wright, “the Song identifies love with the most powerful force in the Israelite imagination—YHWH, the divine warrior.” Wilson-Wright uses the comparative method, using texts from within and outside of the Hebrew Bible. However, if you read the Song itself, you realize that Wilson-Wright is wrong. The Song has almost no mention of war, divine or otherwise, and it never uses that ubiquitous Hebrew name of God, YHWH. Wilson-Wright can come to his conclusion only by ignoring the end of the passage, “Yet if a man were to expend all the wealth of his household for love, people would surely heap scorn upon him,” which strongly militates against the idea that the poet is making a statement about love as the God of Israel.

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There is thus one thing that love does not overpower among the common people, and that is money—a startlingly modern sentiment. Yet the poet probably says this wryly, as something he or she (some scholars believe a woman wrote the book4) deplores, based on the attitude toward love manifested in the entirety of this little Biblical book.

The sentiment in the last line of the Song quoted above has the ring of a proverb, and we may compare it to Proverbs 6:30–31. (The words in italics are found in the Hebrew of both Proverbs and Song of Songs):

[People] should not despise the thief who steals
to fill his gullet because he is starving.
But if he is caught he shall pay sevenfold;
he shall expend all the wealth of his house.

(Proverbs 6:30–31, author’s translation)

[Yet] if a man were to expend all the wealth of his house for love,
[People] would surely despise him.

(Song of Songs 8:7b, author’s translation)

Although the topic in Proverbs is different from the verse in the Song, the overlap in language is striking. The Song has been considered wisdom literature. Yet if we compare it to books that are clearly in the wisdom genre—namely Proverbs, Job and Ecclesiastes—we see that while the Song here and elsewhere has a connection to wisdom, it is in a class by itself. Where else in the Bible can you find lines like, “My love is mine, and I am his”?

The Song (at least on the basic level) doesn’t treat God or the fate of the people Israel: The name Israel appears but once in passing in the book—in Song of Songs 3:7. No less a Bible scholar than James Kugel (and among others, Wilson-Wright) has translated the words I translated above, “mighty blaze” (Hebrew shalhebetyah) as “flame of Yah,” where Yah is a divine name, a sort of abbreviation for the four-lettered name of God, YHWH. However, many scholars disagree and argue that the “yah” of Hebrew shalhebetyah is not to be taken as a divine name or epithet, but as a superlative (hence my translation, “mighty blaze”; compare with Jeremiah 2:31, “deep gloom”). And shalhebetyah is a reference not to the God of Israel but to love, as the continuation, “Torrential waters cannot extinguish love,” shows. “Torrential waters” come as an antithesis to the “mighty blaze,” but the word that is in parallel with shalhebetyah is love. The word that I translate as “extinguish” always refers to something burning, usually a flame—sometimes the burning of God’s wrath. (A good example is Jeremiah 7:20: “Thus says the Lord God: My wrath and rage shall be poured out [singular verb in Hebrew] … It shall burn, with none to extinguish it” [author’s translation].) Here it is love that is burning. Just so it is love whose flames are flames of fire, approaching the text from the other side. The poet’s language is crystal clear; it sings in a fresh way of the power of love. We see this, too, in the image of the woman’s wishing to be a seal on the male lover’s heart and arm to express her love, in a way that Shakespeare imitated when he wrote of Romeo wishing to be a glove on Juliet’s hand.

The poet’s aim, I would posit, is to sing of love with all the power of the Hebrew tongue. The Song is not a polemic, as some think, but a song of victory celebrating romantic love. And Song of Songs 8:6–7 is the “key” that unlocks the poem. A brief example: Chapter 3 begins with the woman on her bed, apparently dreaming. Yet she awakes and rouses herself in search of her love, encounters the city watchmen, and then finds her man. There are scholars who claim the whole thing must be a dream, because no woman would go out at night in ancient Jerusalem. It seems to me that a young woman—presumably a teenager—who is madly in love would risk going out at night. Chapter 5 fleshes out this contention. The lover knocks, but the woman is slow to answer. He disappears into the night, and she heads after him, only to receive a hiding—perhaps actually a wound—from the watchmen.

The poet isn’t naïve: “Harsh as the netherworld is passion.” Thus we see that the passage with which we began is the key to these two episodes, for to the impetuous young woman, “love is strong as death.”

Biblical Views: “Love Is Strong as Death—but Don’t Spend the Family’s Wealth” by Philip Stern was originally published in Biblical Archaeology Review, January/February 2017. It was first republished in Bible History Daily on February 13, 2017.Dr. Philip Stern is the author of The Biblical Herem: A Window on Israel’s Religion Experience (1991), and his current projects include aiding a colleague with a translation of Job and working on a commentary of the Song of Songs.

]]>https://www.biblicalarchaeology.org/daily/biblical-topics/bible-interpretation/song-of-songs/feed/4A First Temple Period Palatial Estate Near Jerusalem?https://www.biblicalarchaeology.org/daily/biblical-sites-places/jerusalem/first-temple-period-palatial-estate-ein-hanniya-jerusalem/
https://www.biblicalarchaeology.org/daily/biblical-sites-places/jerusalem/first-temple-period-palatial-estate-ein-hanniya-jerusalem/#respondTue, 13 Feb 2018 16:37:15 +0000https://www.biblicalarchaeology.org/?p=53110Archaeologists excavating at Ein Hanniya outside of Jerusalem unearthed seventh-century B.C.E. finds that suggest the presence of a palace in the First Temple period.

Archaeologists excavating at Ein Hanniya outside of Jerusalem discovered a Byzantine-period complex (c. 500 C.E.), seen here. The dig also unearthed seventh-century B.C.E. finds that suggest the presence of a palace in the First Temple period. Photo: Assaf Peretz, Israel Antiquities Authority.

Following a tumultuous end to the Bronze Age that saw the abandonment of urban centers and mass migrations of populations, the advent of the Iron Age witnessed the emergence of a newly settled landscape. Massive fortified cities were renovated, villages and hamlets flourished throughout the countryside, and lavish palatial estates bespeckled the coastal plains and highlands of the Southern Levant as a new class of elites developed in the First Temple period kingdoms.

The function of these palatial estates in the dynamic landscapes and local economies of the Iron Age remains the subject of considerable scholarship by archaeologists, historians, epigraphers, and anthropologists. Analogs from across the Mediterranean include Greek oikoi (traditional homes) and Etruscan villas, which served not only important roles in public administration, but were also places of entertainment, gathering, craft and ceramic production, and storage and redistribution of goods. The roles of palaces in antiquity were far greater than administrative buildings and royal residences; palaces were often local centers of manufacturing and food processing as well as extravagant reception spaces where elites and rulers would entertain guests and conduct diplomacy.

By the seventh century B.C.E., Jerusalem was a bustling capital city of the Kingdom of Judah. Just outside of the city limits in the Valley of Rephaim National Park, archaeologists have discovered the location of a rural estate occupied for more than a thousand years, from the seventh century B.C.E., the First Temple period, to the early Byzantine period, around 500 C.E. After six years of excavation and restoration, Ein Hanniya Park was dedicated with a festive tree-planting ceremony last week and attended by Jerusalem Mayor Nir Barkat, Israel Antiquities Authority (IAA) Director General Israel Hasson, and others.

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Excavation of the site took place between 2012 and 2016 under the direction of IAA archaeologists Irina Zilberbod and Yaakov Billig, with assistance from Jerusalem district archaeologist Dr. Yuval Baruch. By the end of 2018, the IAA hopes to open the park to visitors.

Among the finds at Ein Hanniya was a fragment of a Proto-Ionic order capital, the top piece of a decorated column or pillar. Baruch says that this style of capital is common for large palatial estates during the First Temple period. This style of pillar has also been found at sites like Megiddo, Hazor, Samaria, and Ramat Rahel—also near Jerusalem—and at contemporary sites in Moab, Ammon, and Phoenicia in present-day Syria and Jordan. Today, the Proto-Ionic capital appears on the Israeli 5-shekel coin.

In an IAA press release, the archaeologists suggested that the presence of the capital means the site could have been a First Temple period royal estate for the kings of Judah in the seventh and sixth centuries B.C.E. However, until further exploration at the site can be conducted, it’s premature to assume the site was home to royalty. Instead, it is possible that Ein Hanniya was one of many such lavish rural estates that sprang up during the Iron Age I in response to new bureaucratic hierarchies after the founding of the supposed Israelite dynasties.

Located in the foothills around Jerusalem, Ein Hanniya was likely the site of a moderate rural estate on the roads to Jerusalem and the coastal plains. Archaeological investigations into first millennium highland settlements suppose that in addition to the head of the household and immediate family, the estate would have been inhabited by landed workers, servants, perhaps slaves, and all sorts of domestic animals. Pastoralists may have shepherded herds in the nearby hills and craft centers at the estate would have produced utilitarian or luxury goods including wine, glass, iron, or textiles.

At sites like Hazor and Megiddo, craft productions of textiles and ceramics are often closely associated with palatial estates. To glean functions of the Iron Age settlement at Ein Hanniya, much more work is yet to be done. Discovery of such rural estates is often rare in comparison to more obvious, large, urban tells, but often reveal a lot about how ancients organized themselves and their economy.

Other finds at the new park at Ein Hanniya include a silver coin called a drachma, minted in the city of Ashdod by Greek rulers between 420 and 390 B.C.E.

The IAA further reports that a number of finds date to the Byzantine period from the fourth through sixth centuries C.E. They include Byzantine-era coins, glass, roof tiles, and mosaic tesserae (the pieces that make-up a tile mosaic) and most notably “a large and impressive pool from the Byzantine period,” according to Zilberbod. A large outdoor complex stood at the site during this period and included a church and a series of roofed colonnades that led to residential spaces with the pool at the center.

“It’s difficult to know what the pool was used for,” Zilberbod explained in a press release, “whether for irrigation, washing, landscaping or perhaps as part of baptismal ceremonies at the site.” The pool drained through channels into a nymphaeon, or an elaborate fountain.

For more than a thousand years, the site of Ein Hanniya remained an important oasis in the hills around Jerusalem, first as a likely elite palatial estate and centuries later as a Byzantine Christian church.

Restoration of the site over the past few years was carried out by the Jerusalem Development Authority, the Israel Nature and Parks Authority, and the Israel Antiquities Authority. The team that restored the intricate water systems was led by conservator Fuad Abu Ta’a, with architectural planning conducted by Avi Mashiah and Yehonatan Tzahor. The group used historical photographs and paintings to return the facade of the nymphaeon to its original beauty.

Samuel Pfister is a graduate student in the Department of Anthropology at The George Washington University.

]]>https://www.biblicalarchaeology.org/daily/biblical-sites-places/jerusalem/first-temple-period-palatial-estate-ein-hanniya-jerusalem/feed/0What Were the Ancient Olympics Like?https://www.biblicalarchaeology.org/daily/ancient-cultures/daily-life-and-practice/ancient-olympics-like/
https://www.biblicalarchaeology.org/daily/ancient-cultures/daily-life-and-practice/ancient-olympics-like/#commentsThu, 08 Feb 2018 15:50:17 +0000https://www.biblicalarchaeology.org/?p=53050Beginning in 776 B.C. as a simple foot race, the quadrennial Olympic Games grew—during a span of 1,200 years—into the most prestigious athletic/religious festival of the Greek-speaking world. The feats of Olympic champions were recorded by historians and poets, and victorious competitors were thought to be the favorites of Zeus, chief god of the Greek pantheon.

Beginning in 776 B.C. as a simple foot race, the quadrennial Olympic Games grew—during a span of 1,200 years—into the most prestigious athletic/religious festival of the Greek-speaking world. The feats of Olympic champions were recorded by historians and poets, and victorious competitors were thought to be the favorites of Zeus, chief god of the Greek pantheon. Below, learn what the ancient Olympics were like in David Gilman Romano’s article “When the Games Began” from the July/August 2004 issue of Archaeology Odyssey.—Ed.

When the Games Began

Sport, religion and politics converged in ancient Olympia

By David Gilman Romano

Nestled in a valley bordered by the Alpheus and Kladeus rivers, the ancient sanctuary of Olympia hosted the earliest, and most prestigious, Greek athletic-religious festival. Starting in 776 B.C. as a simple foot race dedicated to Zeus, the quadrennial Olympic games expanded into a five-day festival—during which 100 bulls were sacrificed to Zeus, and athletic events were contested—that attracted tens of thousands of people to Olympia from all over the Greek-speaking world. Photo: From Ancient Greece.

As in antiquity, we call these celebrations Olympiads, and we number them sequentially. Athletes from around the world participate in events also contested in long-ago Olympia: the javelin, the long jump, footraces, wrestling and boxing. Even the words we use to refer to these events are often the same (“discus,” “pentathlon”), as are the names of places for competition and training (“gymnasium,” “stadium” and “hippodrome”).a

According to the fifth-century B.C. Greek poet Pindar,

If you wish to celebrate great games
look no further for another star
shining through the sky
brighter than the sun
or for contests greater than the Olympic Games.1

Every four years, athletes, dignitaries, emissaries and tourists traveled to Olympia for an athletic-religious festival in honor of Zeus. The festival began with the second full moon following the summer solstice—that is, the end of July or the beginning of August. At first, in the eighth century B.C., the festival was small and the athletes came from the nearby cities and towns of the western and southern Peloponnesus. By the fifth century B.C., however, athletes were flocking to Olympia from all over the Greek-speaking world for the five-day celebration, and 100 bulls were sacrificed to Zeus at Olympia’s sanctuary.

Olympia is actually located far from the mountain that gives the site its name. Mount Olympus, the tallest mountain in Greece (9,570 feet) and the mythological home of the Greek pantheon, sits hundreds of miles to the north. Olympia lies at the juncture of the Alpheus and the Kladeus rivers, in a wide, fertile river valley only 7 miles from the Ionian Sea.

The Olympic Games were the oldest and the most prestigious of the four great panhellenic festivals (or national festivals, as opposed to the numerous local festivals celebrated all over the Greek world), each of which was dedicated to a god. The games at Olympia (Zeus) were supposedly inaugurated in 776 B.C.; the games at Delphi (Apollo) in 582 B.C.; the games at Isthmia (Poseidon) also in 582 B.C.; and the games at Nemea (Zeus) in 573 B.C. (See Stephen G. Miller’s “The Other Games: When Greeks Flocked to Nemea.”)

Tracing the enigmatic, mystical genesis of the Greek Olympiad,The Olympic Games: How They All Begantakes you on a journey to ancient Greece with some of the finest scholars of the ancient world. Ranging from the original religious significance of the games to the brutal athletic competitions, this free eBook paints a picture of the ancient sports world and its devoted fans.

Once filled with the richest olive oil, this sixth-century B.C. vase, now in Vienna’s Kunsthistorisches Museum, was presented to a champion athlete at a local festival in Athens. Whereas winners’ prizes at the four ancient panhellenic games (held at Olympia, Nemea, Delphi and Isthmia) were simply wreaths symbolizing victory, athletes at local festivals often received prizes of material value. Photo: Erich Lessing.

The victors in all of the panhellenic events received symbolic awards, in the form of wreaths. Those who won events at local festivals, however, generally received prizes of some material value; victors in the games at Argos won a shield, for example, while those who won in Athens received amphoras filled with olive oil. The panhellenic victors, too, often received a little something in addition to honor; they were routinely rewarded with cash and privileges upon returning home.b A fifth-century B.C. inscription recounts that Athenian citizens who won competitions at panhellenic festivals got a free meal every day for the rest of their lives in the prytaneion (town hall), along with other civic honors.2

Two Greek myths account for the origins of the ancient Olympic Games. According to Pindar, Heracles created the site of Olympia for the festival:

[Heracles] measured out a sacred precinct for his father most mighty; he fenced in the altisc and set it apart in the open, and he made the surrounding plain a resting place for banqueting.3

The second-century A.D. writer Pausanias relates that Heracles won victories at Olympia in wrestling and pancratium.4

In another story, a young man named Pelops travels to the western Peloponnesus to compete for the hand of Hippodameia, the daughter of the wealthy king Oenomaus. According to Pindar, Pelops and Oenomaus compete in a chariot race, during which the king is killed. Pelops wins the race, marries Hippodameia and establishes the Olympic Games.5 The region of Greece where Olympia is found is thus named the Peloponnesus, or “Pelops Island.” At Olympia, the ancients erected a shrine to Pelops, called the Pelopeion.

Both myths are depicted in the sculptural program of the Temple of Zeus at Olympia. The pedimental sculpture from the east facade depicts the moment before the chariot race between Pelops and Oenomaus, and the metopes—or relief carvings—inside the front and rear porches include depictions of Heracles’s 12 labors (one was to clean the Augean Stables, which Heracles accomplished by diverting one of the two rivers that meet at Olympia, the Alpheus).

A Doric colonnade encloses Olympia’s third-century B.C. palaestra, a large square courtyard where ancient athletes trained for the games. A series of rooms and halls opened off the colonnade, including three chambers that functioned as a library, and a room that served as a dining room. Photo: The Art Archive/Dagli Orti.

The exact origins of the Olympic festival, however, are lost in the shadowy dark ages of Greek history. The 776 B.C. date is based on the Olympic Register, a listing of Olympic victors compiled by Hippias of Elis in the fifth century B.C. and then worked on by others throughout antiquity. But there is evidence that the religious cult, and possibly even the athletic contests, may be even older. Pottery found in recent German excavations at Olympia suggests that cult activity in the area of the altis (the enclosed heart of the sanctuary) dates to the late 11th century B.C.6 Bronze dedications from the tenth and ninth centuries B.C. have also been discovered at Olympia, including tripods and miniature charioteers—which may indicate that equestrian games were held at this early date.

The sanctuary of Zeus lay just south of Cronus Hill (named after Zeus’s father). The principal part of the sanctuary was the altis, a walled enclosure that included the ash altar of Zeus, the altar of Hera (Zeus’s wife), the Pelopeion, the Temple of Hera, the Temple of Zeus and the Temple of Rhea (Zeus’s mother). Statues were set up in and around the altis to honor victorious athletes and to commemorate military victories and political alliances.

The ash altar to Zeus was probably the earliest structure at the sanctuary. At the beginning of each Olympic festival, participants would march into the sanctuary and sacrifice 100 bulls to Zeus at this altar. In the second century A.D., according to Pausanias, the altar consisted of a stone platform, where animals were sacrificed; piled on this base was a tower of ash, where the thighs of the sacrificed animals were burned. Pausanias observes that the ash altar reached 22 feet into the air. Following the sacrifice of the bulls, the crowd consumed the meat at a great public banquet.7

The massive Temple of Zeus, built between 471 and 457 B.C., was 210 feet long and 90 feet wide—only 16 feet shorter and 10 feet narrower than the Parthenon in Athens (which was completed some 20 years later). The temple’s Doric colonnade consisted of six columns at each end and 13 columns along the sides, and the roof supported tiles made of Pentelic marble (from Mount Pentelicus, near Athens, which also supplied the marble for the Parthenon). The temple’s pediments, 40 feet above the ground, were adorned with sculptures depicting scenes from Greek myth—Lapiths battling Centaurs on the west end, and Pelops, Oenomaus and their entourages on the east end (where visitors entered).

Inside the temple, completely filling its west end, was a 40-foot-high bronze statue of Zeus sitting on a throne—which became one of the Seven Wonders of the Ancient World. The statue was made by the Athenian sculptor Phidias (c. 490-425 B.C.) in a common Greek style called chryselephantine, meaning that it was covered with gold and ivory (like the statue of Athena in the Parthenon, which was also made by Phidias).

Zeus (the headless central figure) oversees preparations for a chariot race between the hero Pelops (to the left of Zeus) and King Oenomaus (to the right of Zeus), who ruled the area around Olympia. Now in Olympia’s museum, these statues originally adorned the east pediment of the fifth-century B.C. Temple of Zeus at Olympia.

In Greek myth, Oenomaus promises his daughter, Hippodameia (left of Pelops), to any man who can beat him in a chariot race. Pelops bribes Oenomaus’s charioteer, Myrtilus (shown kneeling next to Oenomaus’s wife, who stands to the right of her husband), to loosen the linchpins of his master’s chariot. After Pelops wins the race, he celebrates by establishing the religious/athletic festival at Olympia. In honor of Pelops, the region of Greece where Olympia is located is called the Peloponnesus (“Pelops Island”).Photo: Vanni Archive/CORBIS.

To the west of the Temple of Zeus was a modest fifth-century B.C. facility where the Olympian athletes bathed. The building had a series of tubs, in which the athletes reclined and had water poured over their heads. A 5-foot-deep swimming pool, measuring 79 feet by 52 feet, lay adjacent to the baths; this pool also dates to the fifth century B.C.

In the third century B.C. a palaestra was added just north of the bath building. This was a large open-air courtyard enclosed on all four sides by a colonnade, which was surrounded by rooms. The Greek word “palaestra” means “the place of wrestling,” so wrestling and other events were probably practiced in the courtyard.

In the second century B.C. a large gymnasium was constructed to the north of the bath facility. This structure included a roofed racecourse, 600 feet long, allowing runners to train under cover. The gymnasium also included a large open-air courtyard for practicing the discus, javelin and long jump.

Tracing the enigmatic, mystical genesis of the Greek Olympiad,The Olympic Games: How They All Begantakes you on a journey to ancient Greece with some of the finest scholars of the ancient world. Ranging from the original religious significance of the games to the brutal athletic competitions, this free eBook paints a picture of the ancient sports world and its devoted fans.

Only naked athletes and the judges who officiated at the games were permitted to pass through this entranceway, described by the second-century A.D. writer Pausanias as “the secret entrance.” The arched gate, newly constructed at the time of Pausanias’s visit, opened into a vaulted tunnel that led to Olympia’s stadium, which was built in the fourth century B.C. on the site of a running track (dromos) dating centuries earlier. Photo: The Art Archive/Dagli Orti.

A vaulted entrance led from the altis to the stadium, and this was the route that athletes and judges would follow during the games.

The Olympic stadium evolved considerably over the years. It began as a simple rectangular running track, or dromos, on which the athletes competed. Gradually spectator facilities were added around the sides of the race track. Archaeologists have found starting lines carved in stone at both ends of the dromos, 600 feet apart (the length of a stadion). Spectators used the northern slope of the Cronus Hill to view the contests. By the mid-fifth century B.C., the dromos was surrounded on four sides by artificial earth embankments on which 45,000 spectators could watch the contests.

Spectators at Olympia stood while watching the games. The word stadion, in fact, may have originally meant “the standing place”—only later coming to mean the length of the stadium (and, for us, the stadium itself). The judges, however, had a small seating section reserved for them on the southern embankment of the stadium. There were also simple seats for dignitaries and diplomats.

The hippodrome—for equestrian events—was located south of the stadium, in the broad, flat plain north of the Alpheus River. Although the hippodrome has not been excavated, Pausanias gives us a description of the structure with particular attention to the mechanical starting gates, designed by one Kleoetas, which provided a fair start for as many as 40 chariots at one time. The starting line had the triangular shape of the prow of a ship, with each of the two sides more than 400 feet long. A mudbrick altar at the tip of the “prow” held a bronze eagle with outstretched wings. The contestants lined up along the wings of the prow, behind ropes held by officials. They then moved slowly forward; when they came even with the altar, the ropes were released and the race began. The hippodrome track was probably about 2,000 feet long and 650 feet wide. One lap of the hippodrome would have been about three-quarters of a mile long.8

An athlete balances on one foot while his trainer helps him stretch, on this sixth-century B.C. red-figure krater painted by Euphronius. The athletic/religious festival at Olympia was dedicated to Zeus, the chief god of the Greek pantheon, and victorious athletes were thought to be the favorites of Zeus—largely because they combined prodigious athletic prowess with moderation and modesty. Photo: Bildarchiv Preussischer Kulturbesitz/Art Resource, NY.

Athletes at ancient Olympia competed to please Zeus. An Olympic champion was the man most pleasing to the god, and the qualities that made him attractive to the god were aidos (modesty and self-respect), sophrosune (moderation) and arête (excellence).

Pausanias tells us that the athletes who competed at Olympia had to swear an oath in the bouleuterion (the archives building), before a statue of Zeus Horkios (Zeus holding a thunderbolt in each hand) and upon slices of boar’s flesh—that they would do nothing to dishonor the Olympic Games.9 The athletes also had to swear that they had followed the regulations for training during the ten preceding months. The athletes trained at Elis, another town in the western Peloponnesus, for the month directly before the festival at Olympia.

From the Olympic Register, we have the names of more than 794 ancient Olympic champions,10 who won a total of 1,029 events.11 The first recorded victor was Koroibos of Elis, who won the stadion race in 776 B.C. The last champion we know about was Zopyrus, a late-fourth-century A.D. boxer from Athens.12

Unfortunately, the Olympic Register is incomplete, nor does it include athletes who competed but did not win. In the 293 Olympiads from 776 B.C. to 393 A.D., 4,760 events were contested; our known 1,029 victories constitute less than 22 percent of the total number. If the ratio between victors and victories recorded in the Olympic Register (794:1,029) is representative of what actually happened over the entire history of the games, we would expect to have 3,672 ancient victors—meaning that we know nothing at all about 2,878 Olympic champions. Possibly future scholars will discover the names and deeds of at least some of these unknown heroes.

Is it possible to determine the greatest Olympic champion? We know of seven athletes who won three times in a single day, the so-called triastes. The only known athlete to accomplish this feat on more than one occasion was Leonidas of Rhodes, who achieved triastes status at four different festivals between 164 B.C. and 152 B.C. He was a swift, powerful runner, winning the stadion (a sprint of 600 feet, or one length of the stadium), the diaulos (a sprint of 1,200 feet, or two lengths of the stadium) and the hoplitodromos (a race with armor). Leonidas’s 12 gold medals (or, rather, olive wreaths) may well make him the greatest Olympic athlete of antiquity, perhaps even of all time.

The ancient Olympic festival, based so completely on the cult of Zeus, came to a close because of competition from another religion: Christianity. Following Constantine (274-337 A.D.), most Roman emperors embraced Christianity as the state religion and, as such, sought to end pagan cults and festivals, like the cult of Zeus at Olympia. The most conspicuous competition for the Christian church came in the form of the festive, intense and wildly popular Olympic Games. In 393 A.D. the Roman emperor Theodosius I closed all pagan temples and called for the end of pagan festivals.

Sidebar: The Other Olympiad

Photo: HIP/Scala/Art Resource, NY.

In his Description of Greece, the second-century A.D. traveler Pausanias tells of a second festival held at Olympia, called the Heraia.

Every four years a committee of 16 married women, one from each of the cities of the region, wove a sacred robe called a peplos for Hera (the wife of Zeus) and held games—footraces for unmarried girls—in three age groups. The three races were held in the stadium at Olympia, though the race was only 5/6 the length of the dromos (the running track in the stadium) for boys and men.

Pausanias vividly describes the girls running their races: their hair hangs down their back, their chiton reaches to just above the knees, and they bare their right shoulder as far as the breast (as can be seen in the early-fifth-century B.C. bronze figurine, probably from Sparta). Each victor received an olive wreath, a portion of the cow that was sacrificed to Hera, and the right to make an offering to Hera.

The Temple of Hera, the earliest temple at Olympia, was built around 600 B.C. It was a Doric structure originally with wooden columns, though these were gradually replaced with stone columns. Some scholars believe that in the beginning this temple was used to house both the cult of Zeus and the cult of Hera, since the Temple of Zeus at Olympia was not built for almost 150 years.

“When the Games Began” by David Gilman Romano was originally published in the July/August 2004 issue of Archaeology Odyssey.David Gilman Romano is the Nicholas and Athena Karabots Professor of Greek Archaeology in the School of Anthropology at University of Arizona. He is a specialist in the Ancient Olympic Games, Greek and Roman cities and sanctuaries, ancient surveying, and modern cartographic and survey techniques to reveal and study ancient sites. He has directed the Corinth Computer Project since 1988, and he is the Director of the Archaeological Mapping Lab in the School of Anthropology. Romano is the Field Director and Co-Director of the Mt. Lykaion Excavation and Survey Project, a founding member of the Parrhasian Heritage Park, and Director of the Digital Augustan Rome project.

Notes:

a. There are startling differences as well. Whereas the ancient festival was held in Olympia over a period of about 1,200 years, the modern games move around the world from city to city. The modern games, too, are much larger and more extravagant, probably the greatest secular gathering of peoples in the history of mankind. At the 2000 games in Sydney, Australia, for example, 10,651 athletes from 199 countries competed in 300 events, for which 6.7 million tickets were sold. And 3.5 billion people watched the games on television!

b. The Greek word athletes means “one who competes for a prize (athlon)” and could refer to those who won symbolic prizes as well as prizes of material worth.

c. The altis at Olympia was an enclave of temples, altars and freestanding statuary enclosed by a wall—the cult center of the sanctuary.

11. This number includes Olympic victories of uncertain date and authenticity.

12. This information comes from a bronze inscription from the clubhouse of the athlete’s guild at Olympia. The building was constructed in the first century A.D. by Nero and was in continuous use until the late fourth century A.D. (see U. Sinn, Olympia: Cult, Sport and Ancient Festival [Princeton: Markus Wiener, 2000], pp. 114-118).

]]>https://www.biblicalarchaeology.org/daily/ancient-cultures/daily-life-and-practice/ancient-olympics-like/feed/1How Were Biblical Psalms Originally Performed?https://www.biblicalarchaeology.org/daily/ancient-cultures/daily-life-and-practice/ancient-music-biblical-psalms/
https://www.biblicalarchaeology.org/daily/ancient-cultures/daily-life-and-practice/ancient-music-biblical-psalms/#commentsWed, 07 Feb 2018 14:00:29 +0000https://www.biblicalarchaeology.org/?p=53008Biblical psalms have throughout millennia been an important part of traditional Jewish and Christian worship. How were Biblical psalms originally performed?

We can learn from Assyrian depictions of ancient musicians a good deal about how Biblical psalms might have been performed. The meditative, introverted lute player on this eighth-century B.C.E. relief from Samal in modern Turkey, for instance, can give us an idea of what the performer of a wisdom psalm may have looked like. Photo: Vorderasiatisches Museum Berlin/Photo Thomas Staubli.

Biblical psalms have throughout millennia been an important part of traditional Jewish and Christian worship. In synagogues and churches around the globe, psalms are sung today as they were two or three thousand years ago. Or are they? How much do we really know about how Biblical psalms were originally performed? What might a psalm performance have looked like in the First Temple period, around 900 B.C.E.?

By examining available evidence, Thomas Staubli of the University of Freiburg, Switzerland, ventures to answer these intriguing questions in his Archaeological Views column “Performing Psalms in Biblical Times,” published in the January/February 2018 issue of Biblical Archaeology Review.

To be sure, there are no ancient music notations to inform us on the music arrangements of psalms in Iron Age Israel. What’s more, even though the collection of Biblical psalms as we know it from the Hebrew Bible was established quite late, the oldest psalms were likely composed already in the 14th century B.C.E., from which we have no adequate documentation from Israelites themselves. Finally, given the Biblical prohibition against graven images (Exodus 20:4), we do not possess depictions of people performing psalms. Because of this absence of direct evidence, Staubli focuses on comparative material, suggesting that we can learn much by simply taking a look at the Levantine neighbors of the early Israelites.

“The Bible does not tell us much about how psalms were originally performed. Archaeology and extra-Biblical texts, however, can shed some light on the music and dance that accompanied psalms in Biblical times,” summarizes Staubli his approach to the puzzle.

As the point where three of the world’s major religions converge, Israel’s history is one of the richest and most complex in the world. Sift through the archaeology and history of this ancient land in the free eBookIsrael: An Archaeological Journey, and get a view of these significant Biblical sites through an archaeologist’s lens.

“Among the Levantine parallels to the Biblical psalms is the famous text corpus from Ugarit on the northern coast of modern Syria,” explains Staubli, referencing the so-called shuilla or the Akkadian “lifted-hand” petition prayers to different deities. Like many of Biblical psalms, these ritual prayers contain in their rubrics designations of the genre, the function of the prayer, or descriptions of ritual enactments. Two examples read as follows:

It is the wording of a lifted-hand to the god Enlil-banda. You do the ritual with either a ritual arrangement or an incense burner.

It is the wording of the lifted-hand prayer to the goddess Ishtar. Its ritual: In an inaccessible place (lit., where the foot is kept away) you sweep the roof, you sprinkle pure water, and you lay four bricks at right angles to one another. You heap twigs of the Euphrates poplar (on the brazier), and you kindle the fire. Aromatic plants, scented flour, and juniper wood you strew. You pour out beer. You do not prostrate yourself. This recitation before Ishtar you recite three times. You prostrate yourself, and you do not look behind you.1

Discovered on Elephantine, an island at the very southern border of ancient Egypt, the following fourth-century B.C.E. papyrus manuscript (P.Amherst 63) reveals that Yahweh was indeed seen as a music lover. Composed within the local Jewish community in Aramaic language but recorded in an Egyptian cursive script, it translates as follows: “Drink, Lord (YHWH), from the bounty of a thousand basins; be inebriated, Adonai, from the bounty of men. Musicians stand in attendance upon Lord (Mar): a player of the bass lyre (nevel), a player of the lyre (kinnor).”2

To learn more about ancient music and enactments of Biblical psalms, read the full Archaeological Views column “Performing Psalms in Biblical Times” by Thomas Staubli in the January/February 2018 issue of Biblical Archaeology Review. Examining both pictorial and written sources, Staubli reveals how psalms were likely performed in times of King David, who is credited with composing many of the Biblical psalms.

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BAS Library Members: Read the full article “Performing Psalms in Biblical Times” by Thomas Staubli in the January/February 2018 issue of Biblical Archaeology Review.
Not a BAS Library member yet? Join the BAS Library today.

In this blog post, Brown University Religious Studies professor Nicola Denzey Lewis answers frequently asked questions about the apostle Peter. Denzey Lewis appears in the CNN seriesFinding Jesus: Faith, Fact, Forgery, which aims to investigate artifacts that shed light on the world in which Jesus lived.—Ed.

What traditions connect the apostle Peter to Rome?

The Repentant St. Peter by El Greco. Photo: The Phillips Collection.

Jesus’ chief disciple, Peter (also called Simon Peter or Cephas), has been associated with Rome for nearly 2,000 years. The earliest testimony to the apostle Peter’s presence in Rome is a letter from a Christian deacon named Gaius. Writing probably toward the end of the second century C.E.—so, around 170 or 180 C.E.—Gaius tells about the wondrous things in Rome, including something called a tropaion (see below for more) where Peter established a church—in fact, the Church, the Roman Catholic church at the site where St. Peter’s Basilica is today. But there are other traditions besides Peter’s tropaion. One early Christian text, the Apocryphal Acts of Peter, recounts many things that Peter did in the city. At one point in Acts of Peter, Peter is taunted by a flamboyant heretic, Simon Magus. Simon challenges Peter to a flying contest around the Roman Forum, but Peter’s prayers make Simon crash to the ground, proving that Simon’s powers are not as great as his own. At the end of this text, Peter, not wishing to be martyred for his faith, flees from Roman authorities on the Via Appia leading out of the city. Rather unexpectedly, Peter meets Jesus, who is traveling in the opposite direction. He asks Jesus, “Where are you going?” Jesus tells Peter that he is going to Rome “to be crucified again.” Peter realizes, from this, that he cannot flee from his fate. “Where are you going?” in Latin is “Quo Vadis?” and there’s a medieval church in Rome called the Church of Quo Vadis at the spot where Peter met Jesus. To prove that his vision was real, you can still see there a bit of marble pavement which the faithful say miraculously preserve Jesus’ footprints.

Is it likely that the apostle Peter went to Rome and founded the church there?

Interestingly, the Bible says nothing about Peter ever traveling to Rome. When the gospels end, Peter is in Jerusalem. It’s the same in the Book of Acts. The apostle Paul, in his letters, also talks about meeting Peter in the eastern Mediterranean. After Jesus’ death, Paul says that Jesus’ brother, James, and Peter are the co-leaders of the “church,” or assembly, of Jesus-followers in Jerusalem. In short, there is no early textual evidence for Peter in Rome, so for some people, it’s very hard to believe that he ever traveled there. Not only is it a very long way, according to the New Testament, Peter was a fisherman who was not very educated and who spoke only Aramaic; he was not the type of person that might travel widely across the Roman Empire to a large city where Latin and Greek were the dominant languages. The absence of connection between Peter and Rome in the New Testament, the lack of references to him in our earliest Roman Christian literature, and what we know of Peter’s background and character all combine to make it unlikely, to my mind, that he ever went to Rome.

As the point where three of the world’s major religions converge, Israel’s history is one of the richest and most complex in the world. Sift through the archaeology and history of this ancient land in the free eBookIsrael: An Archaeological Journey, and get a view of these significant Biblical sites through an archaeologist’s lens.

Is there any evidence that the apostle Peter died in Rome?

St. Peter’s Basilica in Vatican City, the traditional burial site of the apostle Peter.

There is no solid evidence—textual or even archaeological—that Peter died in Rome. Starting around the end of the second century, Christian pilgrims went to see Peter’s tropaion. But a tropaion is not a tomb. The word itself is very unusual; sometimes translated as “trophy,” it means something like a war memorial or a cenotaph (i.e., an empty grave). It’s not the word used in the Roman Empire for a burial place. Yet this spot—which was originally in the middle of an ancient cemetery—was quickly understood as the place where Peter was buried. When it was excavated in the 1950s, archaeologists were shocked to find that there was no grave and no bones under the tropaion. Only later were some bones produced from that excavation, and it’s a fascinating story we talk about in Finding Jesus. Are these Peter’s bones? That appears to be a matter of faith. The official Vatican position, first stated in 1968, is that they might be.

Why are there two places in Rome where the apostle Peter was supposedly buried?

This is another fascinating thing we explore in Finding Jesus. Most people know about Peter’s traditional burial site at St. Peter’s. But it turns out that there’s a second site in Rome where pilgrims went for hundreds of years, which was known as the Memoria Apostolorum (the Memorial to the Apostles). It’s off the Via Appia at the modern site of the Catacombs of San Sebastiano, and you can still go and visit it today, although the memorial itself is largely built over. What’s amazing is that the site preserves around 600 graffiti scrawled by Christian pilgrims in the early Middle Ages, most of them prayers to Peter and Paul, the joint patron saints of Rome. It certainly looks like people believed that Peter was buried there, but excavators found no evidence of a tomb there, either! As far as I can tell, this leaves us with two options: Either Peter’s body was at both these sites at one point and moved from one to the other, or Peter’s body was never at either site, but people still associated him with the site. It didn’t always take a body or a tomb for a site to be sacred, after all.

This Bible History Daily feature was originally published on March 31, 2017.Nicola Denzey Lewis, Visiting Associate Professor in the Department of Religious Studies at Brown University, specializes in Gnosticism, Late Antiquity, Roman social history, the history of Christianity, and women and gender. Her recent publications include Cosmology and Fate in Gnosticism and the Graeco-Roman World (Brill, 2013) and Introduction to “Gnosticism” (Oxford Univ. Press, 2013).

]]>https://www.biblicalarchaeology.org/daily/people-cultures-in-the-bible/people-in-the-bible/the-apostle-peter-in-rome/feed/43Newly Deciphered Dead Sea Scroll Reveals 364-Day Calendarhttps://www.biblicalarchaeology.org/daily/biblical-artifacts/dead-sea-scrolls/qumran-community-364-day-calendar/
https://www.biblicalarchaeology.org/daily/biblical-artifacts/dead-sea-scrolls/qumran-community-364-day-calendar/#commentsFri, 02 Feb 2018 15:42:19 +0000https://www.biblicalarchaeology.org/?p=52952Researchers recently deciphered one of the last two remaining Dead Sea Scrolls. Written in code, the scroll describes a 364-day calendar used by the Qumran community that lived in the Judean Desert.

Of the estimated 900 documents that comprise the Dead Sea Scrolls, two remain unpublished—until now. Scholars Eshbal Ratson and Jonathan Ben-Dov of the Department of Bible Studies at the University of Haifa recently published one of the last two remaining Dead Sea Scrolls in their article “A Newly Reconstructed Calendrical Scroll from Qumran in Cryptic Script” in the Journal of Biblical Literature (Winter 2017). For more than a year, the scholars diligently pieced together 62 Dead Sea Scroll fragments, on which there was writing in code. Ratson and Ben-Dov deciphered the code on the reconstructed scroll, called Scroll 4Q324d, and revealed that the scroll describes a 364-day calendar used by the Qumran community that lived in the Judean Desert. This Qumran calendar gives us insight into how the community organized the seasons and religious festivals, and it sheds light on scribal customs.

A portion of the recently deciphered Dead Sea Scroll 4Q324d containing a 364-day calendar used by the Qumran community in the Judean Desert. Photo: Courtesy of the University of Haifa.

As the point where three of the world’s major religions converge, Israel’s history is one of the richest and most complex in the world. Sift through the archaeology and history of this ancient land in the free eBookIsrael: An Archaeological Journey, and get a view of these significant Biblical sites through an archaeologist’s lens.

[W]e now understand much better the evolution of the authoritative Masoretic text of the Hebrew Bible and its relation to the other textual traditions (including the Greek Septuagint) that existed in Second Temple times. In the Qumran community, differing Biblical text types or textual families coexisted, apparently without conflict. An official authoritative text had not yet been finalized.

We have also come to understand the varying modes of Biblical exegesis that would later influence the authoritative texts of both Judaism and Christianity.

Tens of thousands of Dead Sea Scroll fragments were discovered in the Qumran caves near the Dead Sea. Seen here is Qumran Cave 4, where the majority of the Dead Sea Scrolls were found.

One issue that was contested among different ancient Jewish sects was which calendar to use. While members of the Jerusalem Temple and the Hasmonean dynasty used the lunar calendar, the Qumran community used a 364-day calendar, as exemplified by Scroll 4Q324d recently published by Ratson and Ben-Dov. The scholars elaborate on the difference between the lunar calendar and the Qumran calendar in a University of Haifa press release:

The lunar calendar, which Judaism follows to this day, requires a large number of human decisions. People must look at the stars and moon and report on their observations, and someone must be empowered to decide on the new month and the application of leap years. By contrast, the 364-day calendar was perfect. Because this number can be divided into four and seven, special occasions always fall on the same day. This avoids the need to decide, for example, what happens when a particular occasion falls on the Sabbath, as often happens in the lunar calendar. The Qumran calendar is unchanging, and it appears to have embodied the beliefs of the members of this community regarding perfection and holiness.

Scroll 4Q324d describes two festivals that aren’t in the Hebrew Bible, but are known from the Dead Sea Scroll known as the Temple Scroll: the festivals of New Wine and New Oil, which follow the festival of Shavuot celebrating the New Wheat. In addition, we learn from this scroll the name of the special day the Qumran community inserted between seasons to celebrate the transition: the name is Tekufah, which today means “period” in Hebrew.

The Qumran scribes used various codes in writing the Dead Sea Scrolls, but the main code they used, which was employed in Scroll 4Q324d, was Cryptic A (named by its decipherer, Biblical scholar J.T. Milik).

“Cryptic A is a simple replacement code, with each letter represented by a designated sign,” explain Ratson and Ben-Dov in their Journal of Biblical Literature article. “Some of these signs correspond to paleo-Hebrew or Greek letters, while others seem arbitrary. These signs played a part in the sectarian scribal practice, as some of them appear as scribal marks in various scrolls.”

“The limited circulation of the cryptic script in the Yahad is useful for the study of secrecy and esotericism in that community,” Ratson and Ben-Dov conclude in their article. “It is also valuable for enriching our knowledge about other cases of cryptology in writings from antiquity, a well-known and intriguing aspect of ongoing research.”

]]>https://www.biblicalarchaeology.org/daily/biblical-artifacts/dead-sea-scrolls/qumran-community-364-day-calendar/feed/11The Archaeological Quest for the Earliest Christianshttps://www.biblicalarchaeology.org/daily/archaeology-today/biblical-archaeology-topics/the-archaeological-quest-for-the-earliest-christians/
https://www.biblicalarchaeology.org/daily/archaeology-today/biblical-archaeology-topics/the-archaeological-quest-for-the-earliest-christians/#commentsThu, 01 Feb 2018 14:30:41 +0000https://www.biblicalarchaeology.org/?p=36300In part one of a two-part series, Douglas Boin presents new archaeological and historical research in the study of early Christianity.

A melange of animals—some real, others exotic—populate the upper registers of a tomb at the Hellenistic city of Maresha. The paintings on site are restored versions of the originals, which dated to the third and second centuries B.C. Photo: Douglas Boin.

The race for the next spectacular artifact is on. Ancient bone boxes, lost manuscripts encoded with secret messages about Jesus, even fragments of crumbled papyrus—some no bigger than the receipts we stuff in our pockets—promise hope of a brave new world in Biblical studies. The assumption seems to be that if we just look a little harder, if we just dig a little bit deeper, one day we’ll find the one piece of evidence that will take us back to the earliest age of Jesus and his followers. To many, it’s an urgent archaeological mission with profound implications for the history of faith.

Just don’t hold your breath. For almost two hundred years after the crucifixion, Roman cities are entirely devoid of any trace of early Christians; to date, no one has ever found any object that’s been plausibly connected to them. As an archaeologist and a historian, I think it’s time we start taking this silence seriously and stop trying to fill it with any more sensational “discoveries.” Many of Jesus’ followers—men and women who lived in the first, second and even third century Roman Mediterranean—simply didn’t want to be found.

That’s not exactly the first thing that usually comes to mind when we think about early Christians, but the evidence is insurmountable at this point. For almost four hundred years, there were no manger scenes anywhere in the Roman world. There were no crucifixes displayed in homes or schools. There weren’t even any bound Bibles tucked into church pews. In fact, we actually don’t even know what “churches” looked like, at least, not until the middle of the third century. For a community that would later come to remember its earliest history as a time of vicious persecution, answered with outspoken acts of martyrdom, this archaeological silence poses a slight problem. Where are these people?

There are two assumptions people usually rely upon to explain the silence. The first is that Scripture, which is to say, the Second Commandment of the Hebrew Bible, prohibited Jesus’ followers from dabbling in anything artistic. The second is that early Christians were too poor and disenfranchised to leave anything noticeable behind. New archaeological and historical research suggests that neither of these traditional explanations are adequate. This post is the first in a two-part series that will explore each of these issues, charting some new directions in the study of early Christianity.

In the free eBookPaul: Jewish Law and Early Christianity, learn about the cultural contexts for the theology of Paul and how Jewish traditions and law extended into early Christianity through Paul’s dual roles as a Christian missionary and a Pharisee.
So let’s tackle the first question. Did the Mosaic commandment forbidding the creation of graven images (Deuteronomy 5:8) really prohibit Jesus’ earliest followers from pursuing their own artistic talents? Recent work on Jewish material culture during the late Second Temple period has shed new light on this topic. At the center of this picture is a twenty-year-old boy, Alexander the Great, and the legacy he left behind in the eastern Mediterranean in the third, second and first centuries B.C.

By the time of Alexander’s successors—the Seleucid family in Asia Minor and the northern Levant, the Ptolemies in Egypt and the southern Levant—sounds of Hellenistic art and craftsmanship were beginning to echo on the shores of the eastern Mediterranean. A visit to two cities makes that clear. At the city of Hellenistic Marisa (today known as Maresha, a site near Bethlehem), archaeologists found tomb chambers with paintings of animals and landscapes that are stylistically similar to those seen at sites like Vergina, Greece, an important site for the Macedonian kings. The animals depicted at Maresha may even have been inspired by a famous Hellenistic zoo, organized by the Ptolemies at Alexandria. The paintings at Maresha have been dated to the third and second centuries B.C. (see image above).

Doric and Ionic columns, friezes, even an Egyptian pyramid shape provided the architectural vocabulary for these two tombs in Jerusalem in the late Second Temple period. These are located east of the Temple Platform, in the Kidron Valley of Jerusalem. Photo: Douglas Boin.

Evidence in Jerusalem reveals similar examples of cultural exchange during this time. Representations of ships and anchors appear in many Jerusalem tombs during the late Second Temple period. Some monumental tombs built in the Kidron Valley, in the shadow of the Second Temple, incorporate architectural styles that were also widely popular. Both the tomb of the sons of Hezir, dated to the second century B.C, and the so-called Tomb of Absalom, dated to the first century A.D., draw upon Greek columns, capitals, friezes—even Egyptian pyramid forms (see image right).

Jewish individuals and groups during the late Second Temple period may have been waging fierce debates amongst themselves about the role of Hellenistic customs in the formation of their Jewish identity—debates we pick up in our textual sources, like 2 Maccabees—but the archaeological evidence is clear: The Second Commandment given to Moses did not prevent Jews from making images. It prevented them from making idols. Appreciating this nuance in the history of Jewish art and archaeology is an important first step to seeing early Christian archaeology in a new light, too.

In sum, how have we ever come to believe that Christians harbored an innate artistic hostility of their own, taught to them in the Second Commandment, when Jews who read their own Scripture came to entirely opposite ideas? To understand why we haven’t been able to find Jesus’ earliest followers means setting aside long-held assumptions like these. In my second post, I’ll tackle another one: Were early Christians so poor that they were never able to afford nice things? The answer to that question, too, is not the one we may think we know.

This Bible History Daily feature was originally published on December 1, 2014.

]]>https://www.biblicalarchaeology.org/daily/archaeology-today/biblical-archaeology-topics/the-archaeological-quest-for-the-earliest-christians/feed/26The Archaeological Quest for the Earliest Christianshttps://www.biblicalarchaeology.org/daily/archaeology-today/biblical-archaeology-topics/the-archaeological-quest-for-the-earliest-christians-2/
https://www.biblicalarchaeology.org/daily/archaeology-today/biblical-archaeology-topics/the-archaeological-quest-for-the-earliest-christians-2/#commentsThu, 01 Feb 2018 13:00:59 +0000https://www.biblicalarchaeology.org/?p=38169In part two of a two-part series, Douglas Boin challenges the idea that Christians left so few archaeological traces behind because they couldn’t afford to make them.

This earthenware bowl was found in a Roman catacomb on the Via Appia. On the exterior (left) is the sign of “Christ,” the “Messiah.” On the inside (right) are the apostles Peter and Paul. The bowl dates to the mid-fourth century, the period when Christians began to mark cups, bowls and dinnerware with Christian signs. Prior to then, even fancy dishes from wealthier Christian homes—like the silver used in Clement of Alexandria’s day—lacked explicit Christian signs or symbols. Images: Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York. Open Access, inventory number 52.25.1.

The quest continues. Expert historians and armchair archaeologists are abuzz with news of a first-century A.D. copy of Mark’s gospel. If true (and let’s be blunt, no one has laid eyes on this mythical creature yet), it will give many believers the joy of beholding some of the first words ever written down in Christian Scripture.

It also might confirm an inconvenient truth which many historians have been preaching about for decades: Jesus’ followers were much more educated and far wealthier than we’ve been taught to believe.

That’s a part of history which usually gets swept back into the dirt during these archaeological treasure hunts. But wealth and influence can’t be left out of the story of the early church. They may even shed new light on the struggle by which Christians won their rights in Rome.

In part one of this series, I debunked the idea that the Christian fear of making objects or images grew out of the Second Commandment of the Hebrew Bible. In this post, I challenge the idea that Christians left so few archaeological traces behind because they couldn’t afford to make them. While the church’s mission to the poor and disenfranchised may be one of Christianity’s most ethically admirable stances today, in antiquity, not all of Jesus’ followers were part of a shiftless underclass.

Paul, a prolific pen pal to people around the Aegean Sea and the earliest person to provide us any information from inside the group, supplies crucial evidence on this point.

Reading, writing and the gear that went with it (ink, stylus, scrolls, tablet) were an expensive part of Roman life. These skills opened doors; they also placed people in the top ten percent of society, our best estimate for the extent of ancient literacy. By the end of the first century A.D.—the time when Mark’s gospel was composed; its earliest surviving copy dates at least a century later—one couple in Pompeii was justly proud of their ability to communicate with people around them. They put a portrait in their home showing themselves with a pen, scroll and writing pad.

Paul’s correspondents were from these same cultured circles. We know from the letters he wrote to them, which follow standard letter-writing conventions and suggest a familiarity with elite social practices. Striking the right tone was important, too. His contact Chloe in Corinth hosted meetings in her home (1 Corinthians 1:11). So did Phoebe at Corinth’s harbor town (Romans 16:1), as well as Prisca and her husband, Aquilla (Romans 16:3–4).

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We don’t need to assume these men and women were among the top one-percent of their day to own property of their own. A cautious estimate would place them in the top quarter of the socio-economic ladder. We also don’t need precise census data to see that, when they met, economic divisions among Jesus’ followers could be fierce.

After Paul left Corinth, he heard that many group members were treating the Lord’s Supper like a luxurious dinner party. The privileged few wined and dined, going home drunk, while members of the lower-class went home hungry (1 Corinthians 11: 20–22). Certainly not an egalitarian community!

These economic divisions wouldn’t be resolved with the passage of time. A century later, wealthy Christians in Alexandria were celebrating the Lord’s Supper “with fatty meat and fine sauces,” Clement, the Bishop of Alexandria, said at the end of the second or beginning of the third century A.D (The Teacher 2.1). Exquisitely crafted plates of gold and silver were being used at Jesus’ fellowship meal (see images above), yet these people dared to call it agape, the Lord’s Supper, Clement said in exasperation.

This fresco from the baptistry at Dura-Europos depicts Jesus as the Good Shepherd. It’s a motif drawn from Hebrew Scripture, one which the Gospel of John also evokes. What few realize is that the image of a shepherd caring for his sheep was the classical personification of good will toward all. In their first attempt at Christian art, Christians had depicted an idea which non-Christians valued, too. Image: Yale University Art Gallery, Public Domain, inventory number 1932.1200.

The bishop wasn’t happy, but many Christians had their own ideas about how to follow Jesus—and it involved making connections with people in town. By the middle of the third century A.D., on the Euphrates River in Syria, one community had actually convinced a local resident to knock down walls in his own home. The result was a new open floor plan for Christian meetings. The owner even installed a baptistry (see image right).

Christians felt so comfortable in their neighborhood, they had finally decided to make some noise. So they renovated a home. It’s the earliest example of Christian architecture that we have. It also comes from a period when most people think Christians were being “persecuted” throughout the empire. Yet the Dura house predates the legalization of Christianity by a half-century. This gradual, rising profile in the archaeological record should change the way we think about Christian history.

Christianity may not have been legally recognized, but Christians themselves were hardly hiding. In effect, Christianity’s political triumph may not have been rooted in its superior “spiritual” message. It may have been the product of something much more mundane: a few well-placed allies and the right financial support. Now might be the perfect time to go back and rethink what it means when we say that the Roman Empire “converted” to Christianity.

This Bible History Daily feature was originally published on March 4, 2015.

]]>https://www.biblicalarchaeology.org/daily/archaeology-today/biblical-archaeology-topics/the-archaeological-quest-for-the-earliest-christians-2/feed/16Miniature Writing on Ancient Amuletshttps://www.biblicalarchaeology.org/daily/biblical-artifacts/inscriptions/miniature-writing-ancient-amulets-ketef-hinnom/
https://www.biblicalarchaeology.org/daily/biblical-artifacts/inscriptions/miniature-writing-ancient-amulets-ketef-hinnom/#commentsMon, 29 Jan 2018 14:00:34 +0000https://www.biblicalarchaeology.org/?p=52898In 1979, archaeologist Gabriel Barkay discovered two miniature silver scrolls from a late Iron Age (seventh century B.C.E.) tomb in Ketef Hinnom outside of Jerusalem. When unrolled, the scrolls had tiny texts written on them—similar to the priestly blessing in Numbers 6:24–26. Curiously, though, these texts were hidden from human eyes, which begs the question: Who was their intended audience?

In 1979 during the excavation of a late Iron Age (seventh century B.C.E.) tomb at the funerary site of Ketef Hinnom outside of Jerusalem, archaeologist Gabriel Barkay uncovered two small silver scrolls—no bigger than the diameter of a quarter—that were originally worn as amulets around the neck. When researchers from the Israel Museum, Jerusalem, unrolled the sheets of silver, they detected tiny lines of the ancient Hebrew script inscribed on them. High-resolution photos of the miniature writing were taken in 1994 by the West Semitic Research Project at the University of Southern California, giving researchers the opportunity to study and decipher the Hebrew text on the ancient amulets. When they finally read the arcane writing, the researchers discovered that the inscriptions, dating to the eighth–sixth centuries B.C.E., contained blessings similar to Numbers 6:24–26.1

The miniature writing on the silver scrolls was clearly not meant to be read—the letters are too small, and the writing was furthermore concealed inside the rolls. If this was the case, then what purpose did they serve? In “Words Unseen: The Power of Hidden Writing” in the January/February 2018 issue of Biblical Archaeology Review, Hebrew Bible scholar Jeremy D. Smoak discusses what these ancient amulets from Ketef Hinnom can tell us about religion in ancient Judah.

Upon discovery, Amulet 1 was 1 inch in height and 0.4 inches in diameter; unrolled, the scroll measures 3.8 inches in height and 1 inch in width. Amulet 2 was 0.5 inches in height and 0.2 inches in diameter; unrolled, the scroll has a height of 1.5 inches and a width of 0.4 inches. The second scroll contains about 100 words arranged in 12 lines of text—thus, the person who inscribed the text was able to fit all of that onto a silver sheet the length of a match stick.

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Amulet 1 from Ketef Hinnom measured just 1 inch in height and 0.4 inches in diameter before it was unrolled. Photo: Zev Radovan/biblelandpictures.com.

In addition to containing blessings similar to Numbers 6:24–26, the inscriptions are illuminating for what they reveal about the deity Yahweh as well as amuletic magic in Iron Age Judah. As Smoak writes:

Amulet 1 refers to Yahweh as the one who shows graciousness to those who love him and keep his commandments. This expression exhibits close parallels to several Biblical texts (cf. Deuteronomy 7:9; Nehemiah 1:5; Daniel 9:4). Amulet 2 refers to Yahweh as the deity who has the power to expel Evil.

As the amulets from Ketef Hinnom contained small inscriptions that were not meant to be read, Smoak further considers in his article the significance of miniature writing:

Miniatures—especially those worn on the human body … create a sense of intimacy, privacy, and personal time between the body and the object. Such objects became part of one’s daily routine and lifecycle. Their lightweight quality allows them to dangle comfortably from necks, producing a feeling that they are part of the body. In the case of miniature texts on jewelry, this means that even though the writing might be invisible or hidden from eyes, the words are always accessible in the wearer’s mind as the writing interacts with the body on a physical level. As the jewelry dangles from, bounces off, and returns to the body, the words inscribed on their surfaces are replayed in the mind.

Read Jeremy D. Smoak’s complete analysis of the ancient amulets’ miniature writing in “Words Unseen: The Power of Hidden Writing” in the January/February 2018 issue of BAR, and discover what these unique artifacts illuminate about religion in Iron Age Judah.